September 2009
Monthly Archive
Fri 18 Sep 2009
Analogue Design Awards
You might recall we were finalists in the EDN Innovation Awards 2009 . Yesterday, we were in Sydney for the EDN Innovation Awards dinner held at Dockside, Cockle Bay Wharf.
We came away with 2 trophies. The awards were:
- Best Application of Analogue Design – Highly Commended
- Best Application of Design Software – Highly Commended
Successful Endeavours - EDN Innovation Awards 2009
Ray Keefe receives the EDN Innovation Award for Best Application of Analogue Design
We are very pleased to have had Australian Electronics Industry leaders recognise our work as being of the highest standard.
And thanks again to Pablo Varjabedian of Borgtech Pty Ltd for his support and encouragement and for having a vision as we do that products like the Borgtech CPL2 can and should be Made in Australia.
There have also been several newspaper articles focusing on the role of local businesses in the Australian Electronics Manufacturing Industry.
Casey Weekly Berwick 31 August 2009 Electronics Whiz Wired For Success
Wyndham Weekly 30 September 2009 It’s A Pipe Dream
Casey Weekly Berwick 5 October 2009 Electronics Firm Delivers The Goods
Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.
Wed 9 Sep 2009
Electronics Development and Success
Hello again,
A couple of posts ago in Electronics Manufacture Shines in Melbourne I said I would explain the origins of our company name. Many have suggested that Successful Endeavours sounds more like a personal coaching enterprise or a business that handles products by people like:
And the list could go on for a long time.
While I do hope we motivate and encourage our clients to improve their results, we assist them by undertaking activities such as:
Electronics Development Activities
- Electronic Circuit Design
- Electronic Circuit Simulation
- Analogue Electronics
- Analogue Design
- Printed Circuit Board Design
- Printed Circuit Board Layout
- Electronic Prototyping
- Electronic Testing
- Embedded Software Design
- Embedded Software Development
- Embedded Software Coding
- Embedded C
- Embedded Software Debug
Development Statistics
The name came from some industry statistics on the success rate for Product Development. You can read more details in Reducing Electronics and Embedded Software Product Development Costs and I will summarise here:
- 80% of embedded development projects fail in someway or another
- Embedded software is 80% of the cost of an embedded development project
- Embedded software is responsible for 80% of the delays and shortcomings
Successful Product Development
So it seemed to me that many Product Development Projects are unsuccessful endeavours. I wanted to change that. We have a success rate significantly better than all the industry norms. Our short USP ( Unique Selling Proposition ) is:
We Make Stuff Work
That’s it. The details are complex but the philosophy is simple. So for me, Electronics and Embedded Software Development should be a routinely Successful Endeavour. And so the name Successful Endeavours was chosen.
I am passionate and committed to assisting Australian Electronics Manufacturers who want to keep making their products in Australia. Made In Australia is what we are pursuing and we are focusing on this segment.
Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.
Fri 4 Sep 2009
There are a lot of news feeds running this story. Here are a few:
Timeline ABC News
IEEE Spectrum
National Geographic
Business Journal
And when the Internet first began, no-one knew what we would be doing with it today.
This has happened to a lot of other technologies. Low Cost Electronics and Low Power Design that can be Battery Operated has made many thing possible such as mobile phones, portable computers including netbooks, notebooks and laptops; portable media players, MP3 players, PDAs and the list has just begun.
But where is it going? Realistically, you need a few things to come together and the environment and carbon footprint considerations now sit alongside the more traditional requirements such as:
- Low Cost Electronics Manufacture
- Low Power Electronics Design
- Design Tool Productivity improvements
- Electronic Design Automation
- Increased Processing Power per milliwatt (mW)
- Embedded Software of immense complexity and flexibility
- Flexible circuits
- Transparent Electronics
- Compact component size
- Reduced Polluting and Increased Recyclability and reuse
Vernor Vinge looked into what might become of this in his book Rainbows End which I recommend as a good read and full of well thought out ideas about how augmented reality might operate including concepts such as wearable computers, gesture recognition, graphic overlays, the equivalent of doing a Google search on any object in your field of view, and other ideas like that. It is set 20 years from now.
The most interesting for me was the way work was conducted in the future and how much advantage there was in having 100,000 people as affiliates on a program. Pay is based on royalties for contributions. You choose what you join and contribute to. Your income directly reflects the product of your contribution and your negotiated royalty rate. A large company has 3 direct employees and everyone else is an affiliate on one or more programs of work. This produces phenomenal synergies.
It will be very interesting indeed to see how much of his vision matches the future.
Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.
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Tue 1 Sep 2009
National recognition for local Casey Business
OK, I couldn’t resist that blog title or this headline. It isn’t often you get a chance to say something like that. If you hadn’t heard yet, we are finalists in two categories in the EDN Innovation Awards for 2009. Melbourne is the Electronics Manufacturing capital of Australia and we are based in Berwick which is administered by the City of Casey . And we are also members of the Berwick Chamber Of Commerce.
Successful Endeavours in the NEWS
The Casey Weekly Berwick has just done an article on Successful Endeavours that also covers the EDN Innovation Awards we are finalists for. You can check it out here Electronics Whiz Wired For Success. And as a bonus, you get to see what we look like.
Electronics Manufacturing
Our aim is to turn Australian Electronics Manufacture into Low Cost Electronics Manufacture through improving the total cost of a product throughout its life cycle. This is not a quality reduction process. Quite the opposite. Getting the product right so it doesn’t fail and does do what it is meant to do is one of the things necessary to reducing cost.
Located on the outskirts of Melbourne we primarily serve Melbourne based Electronics Manufacturers by providing them with Electronics and Embedded Software Development services that save them up to 70% compared to traditional linear Product Development.
So how do we do that?
Firstly, there are a few blog posts you can refer back to that will fill in some of the details.
Successful Product Development
Australian Electronics Manufacturing
Low Cost Electronics Manufacture in Australia that competes favourable with China is feasible. Ignoring the trade offs discussed in the links above, the steps to take are:
- Identify the primary priority – is it time, cost, performance?
- Reviews costs – all the costs – see the last link above if you are sure what they all are
- Reduce Cost through redesign to remove unnecessary labour and to streamline manufacture
- Implement
- Deploy
- Monitor and correct as required
Written like this it sound simple, and conceptually it is. Where it gets lost is in the assumption that it can’t be that simple. But there aren’t any hidden traps in this process.
We have had a few queries about how we came up with our company name, Successful Endeavours. Next post I will reveal all.
Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.
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